SELLING your Celtic? » Pedigree Pieces

Chris Rudd’s pedigree pieces

At Chris Rudd we’re happy to buy all kinds of Celtic coins – bronze, silver or gold: common or rare; VF or EF; orphan or pedigree. Here are a few of the many pedigree pieces we’ve had. We’d like to buy yours when you’re ready to sell. Or auction them for you, if you prefer. For expert advice ask liz@celticcoins.com

Freckenham Flower, Two Wheels Type, gold stater, ABC 1432, ex Henry Richard Mossop DFC (1919-88), author of The Lincoln Mint, from what Sir John Evans calls “a very important hoard” found in 1885 at Forest Heath, Freckenham, Suffolk. Evans says: “The discovery was made by a labourer working in his own garden, who in digging came across a small urn” containing about 90 gold staters. Chris Rudd List 110, March 2010, No.21.£1,200

Westerham North gold stater, ABC 2430, ex Carn Brea hoard, 1749, recorded and illustrated by Rev.William Borlase (1695-1772) in The Antiquities of Cornwall, 1759 ed. Borlase, an early Celticist, believed that Cornwall, with its supposedly uncorrupted Celtic language and megalithic monuments, was well suited for providing evidence complementary to written history in investigating Britain’s inhabitants.

Drawing from Borlase, 1759, pl.23, no.IX.

Carn Brea, near Redruth, Cornwall, where a hoard of more than 17 iron age gold coins was found in 1749. The rough stone wall of
Carn Brea’s Neolithic enclosure took an estimated 30,000 hours to build.

Five of the Carn Brea coins went to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Other disappeared from public view, including the Westerham North gold stater shown above. Two centuries later, probably in the early 1970s, it turned up in the collection of war hero Henry Mossop, ‘The Flying Farmer’ and pioneer metdet, who was shot down over the Rhine on 21 June 1944, imprisoned for a year in Stalag Luft III and awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his bravery. This gold stater is now in the Royal Cornwall Museum. Chris Rudd List 113, September 2010, No.38. £1,500